Building a better life for you and your family. That’s what being a Conservative means. That’s the promise Britain has always offered.
It’s the opportunity I’ve enjoyed as a girl from Nigeria who came here as a 16 year old and grew to love the United Kingdom.
The UK is an amazing success story – a multi-national, multi-faith, multi-racial democracy respected across the world. The values we stand for are those that raise people up and see the best in everyone.
But not everyone shares in that success. There are inequalities in our society. Children in inadequate schools, young people without the best qualifications, communities where people live lives less fulfilled and die younger and poorer.
Kemi Badenoch said her mission as Equalities Minister is to ensure everyone shares in Britain’s success as a multi-national, multi-faith, multi-racial democracy
As Minister for Equalities, it’s my mission to change that.
That’s the message of Inclusive Britain, the Government’s new strategy on overcoming inequality published today.
Inclusive Britain lays out an action plan which will help everyone in Britain enjoy greater opportunities – in school, in the workplace, in their own way. It builds on the comprehensive work of the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities led by the brave academic Dr Tony Sewell.
It also outlined where racism does exist and the important work that government must do to eliminate it.
This is also part of my mission. As someone who has been on the receiving end of racism myself, I know all too well the damage it can cause and am determined that as a government we will do everything in our power to ensure that prejudice and discrimination have no place in our society. No exceptions. No excuses.
We won’t achieve this, however, if we undermine the values, traditions and institutions which embody the best of Britain.
And we certainly won’t achieve greater equality if we fall for the narrative that this country and its institutions are fundamentally racist, that the lack of opportunity experienced by people from ethnic minorities is all due to racial prejudice and we won’t achieve equality until we decolonise this, tear down that and put our entire history and every person of ‘privilege’ in the dock for crimes of commission and omission.
A society that sees everything through the prism of race and ethnicity will never be a society at ease with itself.
It certainly will not be a society that is welcoming to the many immigrants like myself who choose to make this country our home. We need to be able to talk about race and tackle racism without creating a more racialised society.
The Commission shone a light on the true state of inequality in Britain today. It identified real problems faced by people from ethnic minority backgrounds and demanded Government do more to extend opportunity.
But, critically, it also showed that real disadvantage is also an issue for groups whose experience can’t be explained by racism, like white working class boys.
And it concluded that the idea that racism in Britain was always the driver for disadvantage in minority communities was not sustained by the evidence in the areas it examined.
Indeed, it holds us back if we use racism to explain all ethnic minority disadvantage and lets those really responsible off the hook.
It’s primarily poor discipline, low expectations and ineffective teaching methods that hold children back in poor schools.
It’s poor leadership, lack of accountability and bureaucratic inertia that keeps people in social housing in inadequate homes.
And if we tell ethnic minority children that our institutions are racist – that the police, the NHS, the military and our parliament are hostile territory – then they will give up hope, lose aspiration, get the message that they do not belong here, and should not join in the common life of this country.
Launching the new strategy, Mrs Badenoch wrote: ‘We certainly won’t achieve greater equality if we fall for the narrative that this country and its institutions are fundamentally racist, that the lack of opportunity experienced by people from ethnic minorities is all due to racial prejudice and we won’t achieve equality until we decolonise this, tear down that and put our entire history and every person of ‘privilege’ in the dock for crimes of commission and omission.’ Pictured: the moment the Edward Colston statue was pulled from its plinth in Bristol in June 2020
Divisions will grow not fade, and all the opportunity that lies before them will be lost for a generation.
The answer to ethnic minority disadvantage is not to get civil servants to read books on white privilege or worry about statues in Oxford colleges.
It is to get ministers to run public services, like education and housing, which are responsive to the root causes of disadvantage.
That’s what Conservatives do best in government and with our new strategy published today, we are on the road to a fairer, more dynamic and more inclusive Britain.